Betye Saar, “I’ll Bend, But I Will Not Break”, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton. Photo: Bert Janssen, De Domijnen, Sittard, The Netherlands c/o CAFAM

Wall color plays a specific role in Betye Saar’s latest exhibit at the Craft and Folk Museum in Los Angeles. The second floor gallery is painted in a soft shade of stone blue and in the world of laundry products, blue is a color reflector that makes whites appear whiter. The color has been a staple in detergents and other laundry products dating back to the 1800s when satchels of powdered indigo called stone blue were added to the final rinse of a wash tub. In Saar’s exhibit this optical illusion is illustrated by a mixed media tableau at the entrance of the gallery. The work features a clean, crisp white rectangular bedsheet suspended from a clothesline and placed behind a chained vintage iron resting on top of a wooden ironing board.

From a distance the scene is a seemingly innocent nod to nostalgized images of laundry wafting in a gentle spring breeze. A closer inspection of the board and the sheet reveal something far more sinister. The top of the ironing board contains a screen printed image of the cargo hull of a slave ship and embedded in hem of the bright white sheet are the letters “KKK” embroidered in white silk thread. The piece called “I’ll Bend, But I Will Not Break” stuns viewers with a sucker punch that comes from a lone piece of cotton that’s charged with the racist remnants of slavery. In Keepin It Clean, Saar’s latest solo exhibition airs America’s dirty laundry and the great lengths our nation takes to conceal the stains of our past. In classic Saar fashion the message in her work is layered, offering the viewer a path to redemption with a salient reminder that there’s always more work to be done.

The show revolves around a series of washboard assemblages Saar exhibited in a 1998 show called Workers and Warriors at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York. The vintage washboards, made from wood and metal are combined with other found materials including clocks, weathered bars of lye soap made from animal fat, and various forms of detritus including photos and snippets of prose. The central figure in the majority of the assemblages is Aunt Jemima, the caricature turned warrior in Saar’s seminal 1972 piece called “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”. History has shown the power of iconography to plant the seeds of dehumanization that perpetuated genocide, massacres and institutional racism. By recontextualizing harmful iconography, Saar plants new seeds of redemption and empowerment. As Kellie Jones observed in her book South of Pico, “we can also consider Saar’s recycling and reinvention of contemptible collectibles as part of a broader act of wide-ranging cultural restructuring and redefinition.”

As much as Saar’s 1998 Workers and Warriors show harkened back to 1972 under the guise of “Unfinished Business”, Saar’s work in Keepin’ It Clean reminds viewers that there’s more unfinished business. In addition to the washboards created in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Saar has created 6 new works between 2015 and 2017 that address the current fragility of the black male body under the ever-present specter of police brutality. In the works on display her use of repetition in content and phraseology remind us that the pathology behind racism not only recurs, but it has taken on new form. However, out of these tragedies black women have mobilized in response to them.

“Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines”

Betye Saar, “Lest We Forget, The Strength of Our Tears, The Fragility of Smiles, The Fierceness of Love”, 1998. Collection of Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Jack Gancarz c/o CAFAM

Much of Saar’s work is an homage to the life journeys of black women and the special way black women transform challenges into opportunities for growth. The washboard theme is not only self referential (Saar’s mother Beatrice worked as a laundress while she attended UCLA), but it is historical. The prevalence of laundresses traces back to post war reconstruction where black women continued to toil under exploitative, harsh working conditions in communal laundries and within their own homes. The exhibition’s catalog notes that between 1890-1910 two-thirds of laundry workers were black women. Within this bleak environmental and economic context, black women reframed these conditions to create opportunities to assert their rights and create affirming spaces. Under reconstruction laundresses were contract workers who did not live in their employer’s homes. This sliver of freedom gave women the space to form loose networks in communal spaces which became incubators for community building.

Just like the redefined heroine in “The Liberation”, the transformative networks created by black women in the late 1800s were tools of empowerment that enabled women to command better wages and more control over how their work was structured. In Keepin’ It Clean Saar’s washboards have been refashioned into totemic objects that pay tribute to the generations of black women before us who have worked tirelessly and selflessly in service of their families and others. This legacy of power borne out of a response to racism and violence serves as both a tribute and an admonishment by Saar that we’ve got to “clean up our act.”

Betye Saar’s Keepin’ It Clean is currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museumin Los Angeles, through August 20, 2017.